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OpenMarket: April 2013

The U.S. government is banning a standard, normal-smelling French cheese based on its own squeamishness. The cheese in question is Mimolette, a commonplace, orange French cheese so mild in flavor that I once confused it with cheddar when I visited my French relatives and ate it for the first time. The ban has triggered protests in New York City, reports the Global Post:

Around 40 protesters took to the streets of New York on Saturday to demonstrate against a US ban on mimolette that has angered lovers of the distinctive...

California Governor Jerry Brown, along with an entourage of high-profile business and financial leaders from the Golden State, recently traveled to China on a trade tour. The agenda included government and private sector partnerships in electric vehicle production, trash-to-electricity technology, and green energy research and development.
But the tour’s main purpose centered on garnering Chinese financial interest in what Jerry Brown hopes to be his defining legacy: high-speed rail for California. (Embarrassingly for Brown, China indicted its former top rail official on corruption charges during the governor's junket.) China is currently sitting on $3.4 trillion in foreign...

Our new euphemism for a national identification system is “identity authentication mechanism.” The Gang of 8, the leaders of which are proponents of biometric national ID cards, included a provision in the electronic employment verification portion of the immigration bill that calls for such a “mechanism” to identify every American at the click of a mouse.
E-Verify, the verification system used voluntarily by about 7.5 percent of employers, is currently national ID-lite. Right now, E-Verify only compares identifiers, such as your name and Social Security number, to the Department of Homeland Security database. This means the system cannot know whether the person submitting the identifiers (SSN, name, etc.) is the individual those identifiers refer to, which would be true identification...

Meet Julius.
Julius is an African American man living in modern-day America. Julius is a fictitious character, but the problems he faces are real problems that real people face every day. He wants the American Dream. He wants prosperity and opportunity. He wants his kids to have a better life than he did. When he retires, he wants to know that his years of hard work have meant some level of comfort in his old age.
In other words, Julius wants what all of us want.
Unfortunately, his economic hopes are continually frustrated in ways both large and small, both obvious and subtle, by a powerful force: labor unions.
In a new CEI video production, an animated film called "The Life of Julius," we see how he is affected by the laws and regulations supported by unions at every turn of his working life.

A page 1 New York Timesstory today describes how the Obama administration, despite opposition from civil servants, radically expanded a legal settlement that had already become a "magnet for fraud," paying out vast sums of money over baseless claims of discrimination at the Agriculture Department in the Pigford case. As the Cato Institute's Walter Olson notes, its story "today breaks vital new details about how career government lawyers opposed Obama appointees’ insistence on...

In a recent Baltimore Sunop-ed and WorkplaceChoice.orgblog post, I argue against Maryland's Orwellian-named Fair Share Act, which contrary to its name is unfair and coercive in nature. The bill (currently waiting for Gov. Martin O'Malley's signature) would make payments to teachers unions compulsory, whether a member or not, throughout all Maryland Public School Districts.
If passed into law, it would require all school districts to negotiate with the Maryland State...